Woman's body found with arms around 4 children in Hyderabad inferno

HYDERABAD: The sight of an elderly woman’s charred body tightly hugging four children – all of them dead – will haunt first responders Mir Zahid and Mohd Azmat for a long time.

“When we managed to get inside the building and reached the first floor, we saw this woman with her arms around the kids – two girls, a boy and an infant. She must have tried to shield them from the advancing flames,” said Zahid, a resident of the Gulzar Houz neighbourhood where 17 members of a jeweller’s family died in a blaze early Sunday.

The woman was clasping a mobile phone with the torch on, suggesting she was unable to see anything because of the smoke. “They had little chance of escaping,” Zahid said.

Fellow volunteer Azmat said that was the moment he knew there would be no survivors. “We put a bedsheet on them. It was an unbearable scene. I don’t think I will ever be able to put into words what I saw in that house,” he said.

The men found two more bodies in the same room.

Zahid and his friends had entered the building by demolishing the wall of an adjacent structure.